by Max Barry
• • •
From time to time she saw students with ribbons tied around their wrists. The ribbon was red or white; if it was red, it meant a senior taking his final exam. The rule was not to talk to them, or even look too closely, although of course Emily did, because one day she would be wearing that red ribbon, and she wanted to know what that meant. She had once seen a red-ribboned boy building a house of cards in the front hall. He was there for two days, making the house taller and taller while he grew thinner and haunted-looking and it got so that people avoided the hall, in case of drafts. Then one morning the cards were gone and so was the boy. Emily never found out what had happened, whether he passed or failed. Another night, she woke to an odd bell and went to the window to see a girl leading a cow up the driveway. An actual, live cow. Emily could not deduce anything useful from this.
At the end of her second year, she found a slip of paper beneath her door, notifying her of a room change for Higher-Level Machine Languages. But when she turned up, she was the only student there. The teacher, a short, balding man named Brecht, handed her a white ribbon. “Congratulations. You’re ready for your junior exam.” She tied the ribbon around her left wrist, feeling excited.
Brecht told her to make a computer print the word hello on its screen. This sounded like something she could do in about two minutes, with a command like PRINT or ECHO. But Brecht said not to leave the room until it was done. She sat on a cardboard box, because this was not a classroom so much as a crypt for the corpses of prehistoric computers, and flipped open a laptop.
So the catch was the laptop didn’t work. She crawled around, testing power supplies and fans. She found a monitor that powered on but had a burned-out VGA input. Everything in the room was like that, she discovered: sabotaged in key ways.
She assembled a machine, Frankenstein-style, from the innards of different devices. It had a hard drive and a monitor and it powered on but wouldn’t do anything else. She had a blinking cursor that refused to respond to the keyboard. The operating system was sabotaged, too.
Her bladder pinged. She had drunk half a bottle of water on her way here, which was unfortunate. Her new goal was to finish this test before she needed to pee into a bag. She uncovered a BIOS problem and then a hole in the boot loader. By the time she got to the operating system, an actual responsive prompt, she knew what she was going to find: All the useful commands were broken. She began searching for bugs. There was one in each level. One deliberate flaw in each layer of software that lay between the screen and the ECHO command. There were so many layers—it was kind of crazy, how much code sat behind ECHO. She hadn’t appreciated that before. There were scripts and libraries and modules and compilers and assembly code, one built on top of the other. Technically, none of it was essential; you could accomplish the same end by manually constructing circuits and moving wires, manipulating pixels one by one. But what the layers did was distill that power into commands. They let you make electrons flow and logic gates close, phosphorous glow and metal magnetize, all by typing words.
• • •
She finished her silicon monster and went to fetch Brecht. He looked at the HELLO hanging on-screen and nodded once and began to pull her machine apart. She felt a little sad. She was learning that people were just machines and it was working the other way a little, too.
Over the next week, she had to be careful when approaching other students, in case they were wearing a white ribbon. Some students disappeared for days at a time, and some didn’t come back at all, which Emily guessed meant they had failed. She hadn’t really noticed before, because the classes weren’t based on age, but there were more lower-years than seniors. A lot more.
After exams there were two weeks of vacation, during which most other students went off to their homes. This left Emily with the school to herself, practically. She felt bored and restless and began to hatch plots to break into people’s rooms, so she could learn something. She spent time with one of the few other students to stay over vacation, a doe-eyed girl with dark bangs and a permanent air of disdain. Earlier, Emily had disliked this girl quite a lot, because she was older and spent a lot of time around Jeremy. But now she was basically the only person here who could teach her anything. Emily cut her hair the same and adopted the girl’s walk, which was a kind of drifting, as if she was being blown through corridors on the pages of a million mournful poems. This was not as successful as Emily had hoped, since the doe-eyed girl didn’t open up at all, so Emily was stuck with a dumb haircut for nothing. But she did discover that the girl swam for an hour every day. So Emily snuck into the locker room and stole her key.
The doe-eyed girl’s room was like her own: a single bed, a wooden desk, a chair, and a window looking over the grounds. But her books were completely different. The girl had Persuasion in Middle Europe and Modern Psychographics and a small yellow book Emily had seen seniors carry around and always been intrigued by, titled Gutturals. That one, disappointingly, turned out to be full of word fragments with no explanation or context. But she pulled down a tome with an alluring title, The Linguistics of Magic, and that was better. It was a history lesson about how people had once believed in literal magic, in wizards and witches and spells. They wouldn’t tell strangers their true name, in case the stranger was a sorcerer, because once a sorcerer knew you, he could put you under his power. You had to guard that information. And if you saw someone who looked like a sorcerer, you would avert your eyes and cover your ears before they could compel you. This was where words like charmed came from, and spellbound and fascinated and bewitched and enraptured and compelled.
This all seemed quaint and amusing, but as the book moved through to the modern day, nothing changed. People still fell to the influence of persuasion techniques, especially when they broadcast information about themselves that allowed identification of their personality type—their true name, basically—and the attack vectors for these techniques were primarily aural and visual. But no one thought of this as magic. It was just falling for a good line or being distracted or clever marketing. Even the words were the same. People still got fascinated and charmed, spellbound and amazed, they forgot themselves and were carried away. They just didn’t think there was anything magical about that anymore.
• • •
When classes resumed, they began to teach her words. No one said what these were for. Charlotte simply handed out envelopes. “Study these in private,” Charlotte told them. “They are not to be shared, ever, with anybody. Repeat them to yourself in front of a mirror, five times per word, every night.”
“Until when?” asked Sashona, but Charlotte just put on her fake smile, like this was an amusing question.
She took the envelope marked EMILY RUFF and carried it to her room. Inside were three pieces of paper. JUSTITRACT. MEGRANCE. VARTIX. They were difficult to read; her brain kept slipping in the wrong direction. They were too similar to real words, maybe. She studied them. She stood in front of the mirror and watched herself. “Varrrrrtttt,” she said, which was supposed to be Vartix, but for some reason it took a long time to come out, time stretching and getting grainy, and not only time but everything: the walls and mirror and air, all undergoing a slow disintegration that she could see and feel with every molecule of her being. She felt fear, because she didn’t want to see what was underneath the world. The sound of her voice fell to pieces and the silence between them froze over. She regained consciousness. She realized this in retrospect. Her fingers and toes tingled. She closed her mouth. There was drool on her chin. She felt bruised in the brain. She walked to her bed and sat. She put the words back in the envelope, because fuck doing that again.
But after a while she returned to the mirror. Her mind revolted. It did not want to be bruised again. But she sucked it up. “Varrrrrttt,” she said.
• • •
“We got words,” she told Jeremy on the grass. She was being less cautious about being seen with him, because he was graduating soon, and what could they
do? “We have to read them to ourselves.”
“How did that go?”
“Badly.”
He smiled. “Attention words are the worst.”
She leaped on this. “Attention words? There are types?” She knew he wouldn’t answer. “What are the others? What are attention words for?”
“You’ll learn soon enough.”
“I want to know now.” But the truth was, she had just figured it out. Attention words. A single word wasn’t enough. Not even for a particular segment. The brain had defenses, filters evolved over millions of years to protect against manipulation. The first was perception, the process of funneling an ocean of sensory input down to a few key data packages worthy of study by the cerebral cortex. When data got by the perception filter, it received attention. And she saw now that it must be like that all the way down: There must be words to attack each filter. Attention words and then maybe desire words and logic words and urgency words and command words. This was what they were teaching her. How to craft a string of words that would disable the filters one by one, unlocking each mental tumbler until the mind’s last door swung open.
• • •
That night she went to brush her teeth and there was Sashona, wearing blue satin pajamas. “Are you still doing it?”
“Doing what?”
“The words. You know.”
“Oh. Yeah.”
Sashona sighed dramatically. “It’s foul, right?”
“Most foul,” Emily said.
“There had better be a good reason for it,” Sashona said, pulling back her hair. “Otherwise I’m going to be pissed.”
Emily nodded. It seemed pretty obvious to her that the reason was to build up resistance. This term she was taking Drama, puffing herself up and shouting at people in a voice that began in her gut, which the teacher called projecting forcefully. It was all because people were animals, analogue rather than binary, and everything in nature happened in degrees. People could be partially persuaded. They could be shocked into letting down their guard. You practiced saying the words so that if anyone ever said them to you, you would stand a chance.
“I can’t remember mine,” Sashona said. “They keep falling out of my brain.”
Sashona left. Emily brushed. Walking back to her room, she heard the TV burbling and saw Sashona in the rec room. She hesitated, thinking about what Sashona had said. About not being able to remember her words. She went to Sashona’s door and tried the handle and it turned.
Sashona’s room was super neat. Emily went to the bookshelf and stood on tiptoe to peer at the books. Socratic Debate was sitting out half an inch, but they hadn’t studied that one for a while. Emily pulled it down, balanced the book on its spine, and let it go. The pages fell open. She saw three slips of paper. Three words.
She closed the book and returned it to the shelf. She was trembling. When she stepped into the corridor she was sure somebody would see her and ask what she was doing. What would she say? She didn’t know. She had no idea. She was just curious.
But there was no one. She closed Sashona’s door and returned to her room. She climbed into bed and lay there, thinking about Sashona’s words.
• • •
Over time she found five more sets of words. She didn’t go looking for them, exactly. But if someone left their room unlocked when they went to the bathroom, she would notice that. And she might wander down to that person’s bedroom and see if anything looked like it was hiding words. She didn’t intend to use them for anything. But they were powerful, and they were there, so she looked out for them. She was an opportunist.
It was strange how many people left their words in obvious places. She understood that you couldn’t destroy them, because they were slippery in your mind; when she tried to recall one of hers, her brain would offer benign variants, like fairtix, which didn’t mean anything. You needed a permanent record somewhere. But Emily had ripped hers into pieces and numbered them on the back and hidden the code to reassemble them in the margins of different textbooks. Everyone else seemed to have just stuffed them into books and drawers, or under their mattress, or, in one guy’s case, in his pants pocket. She couldn’t understand leaving something lying around that could hurt you.
• • •
“I know everything,” she told Jeremy. “I figured it all out. So, good news, I don’t need to pester you with questions anymore.”
He glanced at her. He was playing basketball. Or practicing basketball. The indoor court was empty but for them. Jeremy was shooting baskets from the free throw line, over and over. She was watching his shiny shorts.
“Once upon a time, there were sorcerers,” she said. “Who were really just guys who knew a little about persuasion. And some of them did all right, ruled kingdoms and founded religions, et cetera, but they also occasionally got burned to death by angry mobs, or beheaded, or drowned while being tested for witchness. So sometime in the last few centuries, maybe even just the last fifty or so, actually, they got organized. To solve the whole being-burned problem. And . . .” She gestured. “Here we are. No more beheadings.”
Jeremy released the ball. It passed through the net with a swoosh.
“Also, the words are getting better,” she said. “I’m thinking that five hundred years ago, the keywords were things like bless. Tribal identifiers. Playing on how we trust people who think like us, believe the same things. Which is a start, but obviously not what you do. It’s not what Eliot and Brontë do. So the organization must have been making keywords. Building them, one on top of the other. Like you do with computer code. First you gain trust from a segment with weak keywords. Not a lot of trust. Just enough to teach them to believe in a stronger keyword. Rinse and repeat.” She sat back on her elbows. “Pretty simple. I actually don’t know why you thought you couldn’t tell me.”
“Have they actually taught you this?” Jeremy said. “Or are you guessing?”
“Ha,” she said. “You just confirmed it. Right there.”
“Bah,” said Jeremy, throwing.
“They taught me some of it.”
He came back, bouncing the ball. “What’s a word?”
“Huh?”
“You’re feeling clever—tell me what a word is.”
“It’s a unit of meaning.”
“What’s meaning?”
“Uh . . . meaning is an abstraction of characteristics common to the class of objects to which it applies. The meaning of ball is the set of characteristics common to balls, i.e. round and bouncy and often seen around guys in shorts.”
Jeremy returned to the free throw line, saying nothing. She figured she must have that wrong, or at least not right enough.
“You mean from a neurological perspective? Okay. A word is a recipe. A recipe for a particular neurochemical reaction. When I say ball, your brain converts the word into meaning, and that’s a physical action. You can see it happening on an EEG. What we’re doing, or, I should say, what you’re doing, since no one has taught me any good words, is dropping recipes into people’s brains to cause a neurochemical reaction to knock out the filters. Tie them up just long enough to slip an instruction past. And you do that by speaking a string of words crafted for the person’s psychographic segment. Probably words that were crafted decades ago and have been strengthened ever since. And it’s a string of words because the brain has layers of defenses, and for the instruction to get through, they all have to be disabled at once.”
Jeremy said, “How do you know this?”
“Do you think I’m smart?”
“I think you’re scary,” he said.
• • •
While he showered, she waited outside on a wooden bench. From here she had a vantage point across the soccer field to one of the parking lots, the one reserved for teachers, and she saw four black sedans roll up, one after the other. People in suits climbed out. She got off the bench and began to walk over, because this was curious, but one of the men turned to her and she felt very cold and st
opped.
The people moved inside. She returned to the bench. Jeremy emerged, smelling of soap. “Are you okay?”
She shook her head. “I saw some people. Poets, I guess.”
He looked at the cars.
“One was an older guy. White hair. Tan skin.”
“Oh,” Jeremy said. “Yeah. That’s Yeats.”
“The teachers, they’re in there somewhere. You know? They’re brick walls, but you can tell there’s something behind the wall. This guy had shark eyes. Nothing in them. Just . . . eyes.” She shook her head. “Junkies get them, if they’re in a bad place. It freaked me out a little.”
“Come to my room,” he said. “Hang out.”
“Okay.” But she wasn’t ready to move yet.
“Seriously, don’t worry about Yeats. You’ll never speak to him.”
“Why not?”
“Because he’s a million miles above us,” Jeremy said. “He’s the head of the organization.”
• • •
Jeremy was going to graduate. She had known it was coming. But he became a senior and she was no longer able to pretend the day belonged in some far-off future. He started begging off slushie runs. He didn’t watch her play soccer anymore. Whenever she knocked on his door he was deep in books, looking tired, making her feel stupid for bothering him.
“Just fail,” she said. “Stay another year. We’d be about the same level. We could even study together.”
“I can’t fail, Emily.”
She got off the bed, annoyed, because she had been only joking. Or maybe not, but still. She began sifting through his drawers, looking for anything interesting. But of course there was nothing, because Jeremy Lattern had no personal effects. Certainly no hidden words. She had looked, a couple of times. Just out of interest. It hadn’t always been like this: She remembered a little toy robot with red arms. He had gotten rid of it sometime since she’d met him. That was what people did here. They shrunk and shrunk until there was nothing interesting left.
